How to Draw Friends to Your Companies or Organizations Facebook Page

How to Draw Friends to Your Companies or Organizations Facebook Page

Today, it’s becoming mandatory for companies, businesses, and organizations to not only have a web site, but now, to also have a presence on Facebook. If you’re reading this paper, hopefully you’ve already realized this, and have already created your facebook page that represents your company, business, or organization. It is not the intent of this paper to instruct you on how to go about creating such a page or what your options are in terms of making a presence on facebook. Those are topics for possibly an additional paper in the future. The purpose of this page is to talk about a few techniques to help draw “friends” or “likes” to your page and make them sticky. Throughout this article, I will use the terms “friends” or “likes” interchangeably since you’ll want either on or the other, depending on how you set up your Facebook page.

What is the advantage of getting friends or likes on my facebook page?

Once you’ve built up the number of friends on your facebook page, you now have a captive audience. This means, that now, each time your company or business makes a new posting on your site, that status or posting will automatically go to the “news feeds” of all those facebook users that are now friends to your page. This is a very powerful way to start doing free advertizing. Just think, one little post about a sale or a special, and it’s immediately in front of hundreds and maybe even thousands of potential customers, depending on how successful you are in building up a facebook following.

Paying for Leads

The first and most obvious way to expand your “followers” or “friends” on facebook is to pay for leads or links. There are several places on the internet where you can pay people who will guarantee you a certain number of friends or likes on you facebook page. Fiverr.com is one such place where you can purchase such a service (www.Fiverr.com). The good news about this service, is that it only costs $5 per “gig”, where a “gig” is a product or service being offered. If interested, simply go to the link provided, and select the “Marketing” link on the right hand side of the page. Read through all the “gigs” listed to find someone who will provide you some large number of “likes” or “friends” to your Facebook page.

One of the pitfalls to this technique is that you can’t be guaranteed that each of those new leads are actual people. It is possible to create many, many facebook accounts with fictitious names. If the person selling the service is using that loophole to create accounts and friend them to your page, then you really haven’t created a true fan base. I’m not saying that everyone uses this technique, but it is something that concerns me.

Setting up a Contest

One good way to attract friends to your facebook page is to conduct a contest. There are a few different types of contests that you can conduct. The first would be to team up with a competing business or company in the same town. (examples could be cross-town auto repair garages, bakeries, sub shops, gas stations, ….). The idea here is that both businesses set a period of time, say 30 days, where the two businesses are competing to see which can attract the most friends to their Facebook page in that given timeframe. Both companies encourage their customers to friend them on Facebook and to actually promote their sites with their individual social networks. Throughout the course of the contest, the two companies or businesses should report the on-going score and site which company is winning. This encourages fans and potential customers to be engaged and interested to see how the competition turns out. It’s important to keep promoting the contest and soliciting new friends throughout the entire competition period. As your “friends” and potential customers, are more concerned with following the actual competition, you and your competing business are busy creating a captive audience for future marketing.

At the end of the contest, the winning business should be declared and in the spirit of good sportsmanship, the losing business should congratulate and acknowledge their defeat. The funny thing here is that their really isn’t a losing company or business in this contest. Yes, on paper, one business achieved more friends in a given time period than the other, but throughout the entire process, both businesses have very easily and inexpensively created a captive audience of customers and potential customers to directly market to.

I’ve seen this technique work successfully between two local garages back in my home town. After the timeframe of the friendly competition, each had acquired near 1000 “friends” or “likes” to their page. Now that the contest is long over, those businesses use their newly found followers to post stories, tips, specials, and sales to their captive audience. They also provide coupons and a vehicle for customers to make appointments and service visits right on the Facebook page.

The best part about this entire method is that it cost next to nothing to build up your following. This is the beauty of social networking. If you tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, …. well you get the idea. The audience gets so caught up in the competition, they even try to help out their favorite business by asking friends to take a stand as well.

The Prize Awarding Contest

So you like the idea above but really don’t know of a competing business in town that would like to join you on this endeavor. Or maybe, just maybe, you have no desire to even contact someone and ask them to participate with you in a little friendly competition. Well don’t fear, you can achieve the same results by holding your own contest where at the end of a given time period, you simply raffle off a grand prize to one of the Facebook users that participated and actually either “friended” or “liked” your Facebook page. Prizes are always a big motivator for lots of people. Whether you decide to raffle off a brand new Apple iPad, or even easier, a $50 Gift Certificate towards your products and/or services, prizes drive behavior.

So in the same way that the friendly competition above motivated people to “like” your page, in this scenario, the grand prize will motivate them. The end result will still be a captive following of potential customers. Even if you decide to spring for an iPad or iPad2 as your prize, it’s still relatively cheap if you compare it against the expense of conducting a traditional marketing plan.

Now I Have My Captive Audience, Now What?

Regardless of which of the methods you decided to use above to build your following, once you have them, now you try to reel them in with targeted useful advertising. In this case, your advertising comes in the simple form of you simply posting something write on your own Facebook page. Remember, that posting will now be seen by the hundreds, if not thousands, of “friends” or “likes” you just obtained. All it takes to reach them is a simply post. That post can mention current specials currently taking place at your business; it could provide free tips or suggestions in whatever area your business specializes in. Finally, it’s an easy way to send out coupons, where you can mention that these coupons are only being given to your business’ Facebook friends.

You should be careful not to overdue it with postings, but one helpful posting a day is more than enough to keep your audience interested and attentive to what it is you’re trying to sell.

If at all possible, try to make your Facebook page interactive. People love to participate in things where they get to contribute. For example, if you’re in the swimming pool business, have people post their favorite swimming pool photos to your Facebook page. If you’re in the auto mechanic business, have people post photos of their car. Hopefully these types of postings will get your audience to interact with these photos being posted and start providing comments. This creates stickiness with your audience. If really neat things start to get posted, word will get out and you’ll get even more “friends” sign up to your site. Once again, this is simply letting the power of social networking work for you.

Good Luck

I wish you the best of luck as you begin marketing your business or service on Facebook. Hopefully you’ll find some of the techniques I mentioned here helpful to your upcoming marketing campaigns!!!! Let the “likes” begin!!!!!

FacebookFacebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people

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